Danbert Nobacon Reflects on Chumbawamba's song "Tubthumping"

Gonzo Tubthumping, Getting Knocked Down And Getting Up Again Danbert Nobacon Wednesday, February 27, 2013 BEN AFFLECK SAID while accepting his Oscar for Best Picture for Argo that: “… It doesn’t matter how you get knocked down in life. That’s gonna happen. All that matters is that you gotta get up.” He was talking about the resolve of artists, which we all encounter in the struggle to keep creating art. It is a testament to the spirit of human resilience in the face of sometimes overwhelming odds, which goes all the way back to our human core in the fact that homo sapiens even made it this far through the evolutionary maze. We feel it when we get the rejection letter but keep on writing or go on to do another show, or whatever it is our passion to do. We feel it in the small daily triumphs over the constraints imposed upon us by the capitalist business model. We feel it when we make the effort to go out instead of staying home. We feel it when our broken hearts begin to mend. We feel it in those moments when we transcend the pain and are fully present in the moment. We feel it when we stand up for what we believe in, and in a thousand different other ways. Chumbawamba once wrote a song called Tubthumping (and check this out for a flash mob) which unknowingly tapped into this quintessential strand of the human condition. It became a world-wide hit. It made us one-hit wonders despite us having eleven studio albums, some of which contained far better songs. It gave the eight people in the band, and still gives us, a modicum of financial security to subsist as working artists in increasingly varied fields. We got lucky, and for that and many other reasons, I still love that song. And as an artist I accept that sometimes your work rebels like a petulant teenager and goes off and has a life of its own over which you have no control. “The songs that inspire the troops on the road to Baghdad” This was a headline from the English Daily Telegraph when the invasion of Iraq was in full swing in early April 2003. The article was about DJ Jonathan Bennett, who was working for British Forces Broadcasting Services, Middle East, based in Kuwait. Because the US army had not set up their own locally based troops’ radio station, as they had done in the first Gulf War, Bennett had become a “GI’s favourite.” In addition to serving British troops, his show also reached and had a large listenership amongst US troops. Moreover, “improvements in mobile technology mean(t) that Bennett and his colleagues (were) broadcasting right to the front line.” “The guys can actually tune in while they are fighting, if they want,” Bennett was quoted as saying. The article went on, “Bennett has no doubt that the music he plays provides a vital emotional outlet for the troops. Indeed, some of the soldiers most popular requests, such as Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping (“I get knocked down, but I get up again / You never gonna keep me down”) sounded like rallying cries against not just the enemy in the desert, but the significant anti-war section of the British public.” I can only speculate, but to think a soldier may have a tune that one co-wrote running through his head as an earworm, in the moments before he kills or is killed is unsettling. That the song would be perceived as an anthem against anti-war sentiment is simply beyond. How sour the irony? It is one thing to have our taxes pay for wars we do not agree with — and this must surely be one of the most flagrantly abused shortcomings of our so-called democratic system. It is quite something else to have unwittingly provided part of the soundtrack for one of those wars as well. Whilst on reflection it did not come as a shock to us, as the authors of the song, that it would be used in this way, there was something shocking about the idea that part of ones’ art was being used to boost morale in fighting a war which we opposed with every bone in our collective political body. There are of course other cultural implications. The song had been popular for an eighteen-month period from summer 1997 into 1998. Having been an anarchist band for the previous fifteen years, inhabiting the underground or the distant fringes of the mainstream, it was in many ways a genuine, though not unpleasant, shock to us to have an international hit record. In so doing, through the mass mediums of daytime radio and TV, we reached a significantly younger audience than we would normally have done, not least in the United States. It meant that we were being heard by children, as well as older teenagers and beyond, and it began to show in the audiences at our live gigs. Quite suddenly we started seeing ten, eleven, twelve-year-olds down at the front of the stage, whilst in the back would be their sometimes hipster, sometimes bewildered, sometimes anxious-looking parents. Looking out into the crowd in Tempe in Arizona, in March 1998, during our song Big Mouth Strikes Again, where Alice Nutter comes on stage dressed as a cigarette-smoking, whiskey-drinking nun, we could see a worried parent stand up behind her daughter, putting her hands over the girl’s ears. That song was a tip of the hat, or should I say habit, to dead American comedian Lenny Bruce. Having had a hit record which did not necessarily reflect many of the other aspects of our work, not least the adaptation of Bruce’s exploration of profanity in the nun repeating the mantra “bullshit, motherf**ker, bullshit,” the parental reaction was hardly surprising. None of us in the band had children at the time, but we did perform that song late last year at the Chumbawamba farewell show in front of our own pre-teen children. ....... Read the full article HERE at the Weeklings.

How TLC Sold 15 Million Records and Went Bankrupt

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Funk legend Sly Stone now homeless and living out of a van in LA

NY Post says he's living in a van in Los Angeles;

Funk legend Sly Stone now homeless and living out of a van in LA

By WILLEM ALKEMA and REED TUCKER

Last Updated: 5:33 AM, September 25, 2011

Posted: 2:05 AM, September 25, 2011

In his heyday, he lived at 783 Bel Air Road, a four-bedroom, 5,432-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion that once belonged to John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas.

The Tudor-style house was tricked out in his signature funky black, white and red color scheme. Shag carpet. Tiffany lamps in every room. A round water bed in the master bedroom. There were parties where Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Miles Davis would drop by, where Etta James would break into “At Last” by the bar.

Just four years ago, he resided in a Napa Valley house so large it could only be described as a “compound,” with a vineyard out back and multiple cars in the driveway.

But those days are gone.

Today, Sly Stone -- one of the greatest figures in soul-music history -- is homeless, his fortune stolen by a lethal combination of excess, substance abuse and financial mismanagement. He lays his head inside a white camper van ironically stamped with the words “Pleasure Way” on the side. The van is parked on a residential street in Crenshaw, the rough Los Angeles neighborhood where “Boyz n the Hood” was set. A retired couple makes sure he eats once a day, and Stone showers at their house. The couple’s son serves as his assistant and driver.

Inside the van, the former mastermind of Sly & the Family Stone, now 68, continues to record music with the help of a laptop computer.

“I like my small camper,” he says, his voice raspy with age and years of hard living. “I just do not want to return to a fixed home. I cannot stand being in one place. I must keep moving.”

Stone has been difficult to pin down for years. In the last two decades, he’s become one of music’s most enigmatic figures, bordering on reclusive. You’d be forgiven for assuming he’s dead. He rarely appears in public, and just getting him in a room requires hours or years of detective work, middlemen and, of course, making peace with the likelihood that he just won’t show up.

There was a time when Sly was difficult to escape. Stone, whose real name is Sylvester Stewart, was one of the most visible, flamboyant figures of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The multiracial, multi-gender band that Stone assembled fused funk, soul and psychedelic rock and became one of the most influential acts ever. The San Fran-based group released a string of hits beginning with the 1968 album “Dance to the Music,” followed by “Everyday People,” “Family Affair,” “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” and “Stand!”

The group’s costumes and showmanship were just as memorable. The members favored giant afros, flashy capes, Beatle boots, neon vests and leopard-print jumpsuits.

Read the full post HERE.

Japan's "Corpse Hotels"

Reuters
updated 9/12/2011 4:38:55 PM ET

TOKYO — Across from a noodle shop in a Yokohama suburb, Hisayoshi Teramura's inn looks much like any other small lodging that dots the port city. Occasionally, it's even mistaken for a love hotel by couples hankering for some time beneath the sheets.

But Teramura's place is neither a love nest nor a pit stop for tired travelers. The white and grey tiled building is a corpse hotel, its 18 deceased guests tucked up in refrigerated coffins.

"We tell them we only have cold rooms," Teramura quips when asked how his staff respond to unwary lovers looking for a room.

The daily rate at Lastel, as it is known, is 12,000 yen ($157). For that fee, bereaved families can check in their dead while they wait their turn in the queue for one of the city's overworked crematoriums.

Growing market
Death is a rare booming market in stagnant Japan and Teramura's new venture is just one example of how businessmen are trying to tap it.

Read the full story HERE.

Four Reasons It Pays for Songwriters To Be Patient (BMI)

July 29, 2011
Four Reasons It Pays for Songwriters To Be Patient
As long as you’re not planning on being a songwriter for this week only, take a deep breath, work on your songs and your career a little every day and enjoy the ride. You’ll be amazed in a few years when you look back and see how far you’ve come.

By Cliff Goldmacher

Looking back on 20-plus years of writing songs, it’s a lot easier for me to connect the dots now and see that the things I was doing years ago would eventually bear fruit. I can safely say that nothing ever moved as quickly as I thought it would, yet I’m constantly surprised at the ways that my long-forgotten efforts have come around to generate royalty income. All that to say, it would have saved me a lot of frustration knowing that getting up every day and working on my craft would end up paying off — on its own schedule, not mine. Here are a few specific reasons to stay patient in the pursuit of success in your songwriting.
Read the list of four reasons HERE.

NYT: The Master's Is the New Bachelor's

July 22, 2011
The Master’s as the New Bachelor’s
By LAURA PAPPANO

.....

Call it credential inflation. Once derided as the consolation prize for failing to finish a Ph.D. or just a way to kill time waiting out economic downturns, the master’s is now the fastest-growing degree. The number awarded, about 657,000 in 2009, has more than doubled since the 1980s, and the rate of increase has quickened substantially in the last couple of years, says Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools. Nearly 2 in 25 people age 25 and over have a master’s, about the same proportion that had a bachelor’s or higher in 1960.

“Several years ago it became very clear to us that master’s education was moving very rapidly to become the entry degree in many professions,” Dr. Stewart says. The sheen has come, in part, because the degrees are newly specific and utilitarian. These are not your general master’s in policy or administration. Even the M.B.A., observed one business school dean, “is kind of too broad in the current environment.” Now, you have the M.S. in supply chain management, and in managing mission-driven organizations. There’s an M.S. in skeletal and dental bioarchaeology, and an M.A. in learning and thinking.

The degree of the moment is the professional science master’s, or P.S.M., combining job-specific training with business skills. Where only a handful of programs existed a few years ago, there are now 239, with scores in development. Florida’s university system, for example, plans 28 by 2013, clustered in areas integral to the state’s economy, including simulation (yes, like Disney, but applied to fields like medicine and defense). And there could be many more, says Patricia J. Bishop, vice provost and dean of graduate studies at the University of Central Florida. “Who knows when we’ll be done?”

While many new master’s are in so-called STEM areas — science, technology, engineering and math — humanities departments, once allergic to applied degrees, are recognizing that not everyone is ivory tower-bound and are drafting credentials for résumé boosting.

“There is a trend toward thinking about professionalizing degrees,” acknowledges Carol B. Lynch, director of professional master’s programs at the Council of Graduate Schools. “At some point you need to get out of the library and out into the real world. If you are not giving people the skills to do that, we are not doing our job.”

This, she says, has led to master’s in public history (for work at a historical society or museum), in art (for managing galleries) and in music (for choir directors or the business side of music). Language departments are tweaking master’s degrees so graduates, with a portfolio of cultural knowledge and language skills, can land jobs with multinational companies.

So what’s going on here? Have jobs, as Dr. Stewart puts it, “skilled up”? Or have we lost the ability to figure things out without a syllabus? Or perhaps all this amped-up degree-getting just represents job market “signaling” — the economist A. Michael Spence’s Nobel-worthy notion that degrees are less valuable for what you learn than for broadcasting your go-get-’em qualities.

“There is definitely some devaluing of the college degree going on,” says Eric A. Hanushek, an education economist at the Hoover Institution, and that gives the master’s extra signaling power. “We are going deeper into the pool of high school graduates for college attendance,” making a bachelor’s no longer an adequate screening measure of achievement for employers.

Colleges are turning out more graduates than the market can bear, and a master’s is essential for job seekers to stand out — that, or a diploma from an elite undergraduate college, says Richard K. Vedder, professor of economics at Ohio University and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.

Not only are we developing “the overeducated American,” he says, but the cost is borne by the students getting those degrees. “The beneficiaries are the colleges and the employers,” he says. Employers get employees with more training (that they don’t pay for), and universities fill seats. In his own department, he says, a master’s in financial economics can be a “cash cow” because it draws on existing faculty (“we give them a little extra money to do an overload”) and they charge higher tuition than for undergraduate work. “We have incentives to want to do this,” he says. He calls the proliferation of master’s degrees evidence of “credentialing gone amok.” He says, “In 20 years, you’ll need a Ph.D. to be a janitor.”

Read the full post HERE.

NPR on the cost of making Rhianna's hit song

NPR

How Much Does It Cost To Make A Hit Song?

03:58 pm
June 30, 2011
by Zoe Chace

Getting a song on the pop charts takes big money.

Def Jam started paying for Rihanna's recent single, "Man Down," more than a year ago. In March of 2010, the label held a writing camp in L.A. to create the songs for Rihanna's album, Loud.

At a writing camp, a record label hires the best music writers in the country and drops them into the nicest recording studios in town for about two weeks. It's a temporary version of the old music-industry hit factories, where writers and producers cranked out pop songs.

"It's like an all-star game," says Ray Daniels, who was at the writing camp for Rihanna.

Daniels manages a songwriting team of two brothers, Timothy and Theron Thomas, who work under the name Rock City. "You got all the best people, you're gonna make the best records," he says.

The Cost of Rihanna's Man Down

Here's who shows up at a writing camp: songwriters with no music, and producers toting music tracks with no words.

The Thomas brothers knew producer Shama "Sham" Joseph, but they had never heard his Caribbean-flavored track that became "Man Down."

According to Daniels, the brothers listened to the track and said, "Let's give Rihanna a one-drop! Like, a response to 'I shot the sheriff!"

They wrote the lyrics to "Man Down" in about 12 minutes, Daniels says.

To get that twelve minutes of inspiration from a top songwriting team is expensive — even before you take into account the fee for the songwriters.

At a typical writing camp, the label might rent out 10 studios, at a total cost of about $25,000 a day, Daniels says.

The writing camp for Rihanna's album "had to cost at least 200 grand," Daniels says. "It was at least forty guys out there. I was shocked at how much money they were spending! But, guess what? They got the whole album out of that one camp."

A writing camp is like a reality show, where top chefs who have never met are forced to cook together. At the end, Rihanna shows up like the celebrity judge and picks her favorites.

>>>>

Listen to the story or read it HERE.

Supreme Court Case on Scholars' Rights and Public domain

Chronicle of Higher Education

May 29, 2011
Supreme Court Takes Up Scholars' Rights
By Marc Parry

Denver

When Lawrence Golan picks up his baton here at the University of Denver, the musicians in his student orchestra see a genial conductor who corrects their mistakes without raising his voice in frustration.

Yet Mr. Golan is frustrated, not with the musicians, but with a copyright law that does them harm. For 10 years, the music professor has been quietly waging a legal campaign to overturn the statute, which makes it impossibly expensive for smaller orchestras to play certain pieces of music.

Now the case is heading to the U.S. Supreme Court. The high-stakes copyright showdown affects far more than sheet music. The outcome will touch a broad swath of academe for years to come, dictating what materials scholars can use in books and courses without jumping through legal hoops. The law Mr. Golan is trying to overturn has also hobbled libraries' efforts to digitize and share books, films, and music.

The conductor's fight centers on the concept of the public domain, which scholars depend on for teaching and research. When a work enters the public domain, anyone can quote from it, copy it, share it, or republish it without seeking permission or paying royalties.

The dispute that led to Golan v. Holder dates to 1994, when Congress passed a law that moved vast amounts of material from the public domain back behind the firewall of copyright protection. For conductors like Mr. Golan, that step limited access to canonical 20th-century Russian pieces that had been freely played for years.

"It was a shocking change," Mr. Golan says over dinner at a tacos-and-margaritas dive near the University of Denver's mountain-framed campus. "You used to be able to buy Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stravinsky. All of a sudden, on one day, you couldn't anymore."

Other works once available but now restricted include books by H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, and C.S. Lewis; films by Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, and Jean Renoir; and artwork by M.C. Escher and Pablo Picasso. The U.S. Copyright Office estimated that the works qualifying for copyright restoration "probably number in the millions."

Congress approved the recopyrighting, limited to foreign works, to align U.S. policy with an international copyright treaty. But the Golan plaintiffs—a group that includes educators, performers, and film archivists—argue that bigger principles are at stake. Does Congress have the constitutional right to remove works from the public domain? And if it does, what's stopping it from plucking out even more freely available works?

"If you can't rely on the status of something in the public domain today—that is, if you never know whether Congress is going to act again and yank it out—you're going to be a lot more cautious about doing anything with these materials," says Mr. Golan's lawyer, Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project and a lecturer in law at Stanford Law School. "You really destroy the value and the usefulness of the public domain in a profound way if the rug can be pulled out from under you at any time."

Read the entire post HERE.

Wire: Collateral Damage (effects of filesharing)

WIRE

Collateral Damage

* Issue #328 (Jun 11) | Essays

Responding to Kenneth Goldsmith’s epiphany on filesharing last month, Henry Cow founder and ReR label boss Chris Cutler counts the cost of free music to those who make and distribute it
“Epiphany No 4: As a result, just like you, I stopped buying music”
Kenneth Goldsmith, The Wire 327

And where’s the harm? Surely uploading is just an extension of sharing with friends, an effective and commercially subversive way to promulgate the music you like? But friends are strangers now; a friend is anyone with a broadband connection. Search engines and P2P sites have turned the entire wired world into friends. And that changes things. You want the latest hit without paying; a bootleg of that Singapore show; some album that went missing in 1960 and was never re-pressed? No problem, a couple of clicks will get it because someone somewhere will have put it on a website and someone else will track it down for you. Of course that’s great. What kind of argument can you have with free?

Well, there’s always the second law of thermodynamics. Free always comes at a price. I don’t mean inconvenience to major record companies – though they’ve been doing all the shouting so far – but the likely and predictable repercussions for the music itself. What does free really mean outside of the purely personal effect of ‘I can get it without paying’ – a claim any mugger could make without scoring many argument points? What are the social, cultural and moral costs, the consequences? Sometimes it’s not only our attention span that has evaporated down to bug durations, but our future-directed thinking altogether. Certainly, as access has expanded, empathetic horizons have narrowed. We all apparently want better health, better education, better pension and social security provision, better transport networks, more police and safer streets – and lower taxes. We want to be paid for the work we do but, if possible, not pay for the work other people do; eat the seed corn now and let the future take care of itself. It’s a model inherited from politicians and careless corporations. So I’m afraid, in my book, the ‘all music should be free’ argument is just an infinitesimal fleck in the onward progress of this idiot wave.

Making a recording is not cost-free or work-free; it’s expensive. And those costs can only be recovered through sales. No sales, or sales so low that costs are not recouped, mean artists are forced either to cut the costs next time (with inevitable negative consequences for quality) or not to record so much – or at all. Along with a lot of dross, good music is lost this way, especially at the margins, where the most innovative work is already barely paying its way. In my own field, I know how many musical projects never leave the notebook because of problems with the pocket book.

....
In a healthy and plural culture, independent funding for independent artists remains the main guarantee of innovative work. And that means the ability, somehow, for musicians to earn a living from what they do. Which is why festivals, performance spaces and independent record companies are so essential: they hold the line. Without concerts or records the equation runs: No income = day job = less art + more compromise.
....
Think of it as an ecological issue, a question of diversity for the sake of diversity. Forget the good guys/bad guys story, it’s just a question of whether we want a static, monocultural, factory farm environment or a diverse, plural, interconnected and evolving one. If the latter, we have to start thinking beyond immediate personal convenience.

Where is honour? We pay the plumber, the electrician, the VAT inspector; we pay the service provider and the telephone company, so why so careless of the musician and the struggling label? If you plant a garden and bring its fruits to term – and your friends dig it up in the night to feed themselves, perhaps praising you for your industry – and then sit back in the expectation of another year of gardening to sustain them through the following year, would you continue to dig and delve? Do vegetables really want to be free?

Perhaps Epiphany No 7 should be: Actions have consequences...

Read the entire post HERE.

How the Dave Matthews Band Makes a Lot of Money

SLATE

moneybox
Concerted Effort
The Dave Matthews Band shows how to make money in the music industry.
By Annie Lowrey
Posted Monday, Jan. 3, 2011, at 4:50 PM ET

As usual, the list of North America's top-grossing music tours of 2010 was heavy on AARP-eligible best-selling rockers: Bon Jovi, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, the Eagles, and Paul McCartney all figured in the top 10. But tucked among them, taking in $72.9 million, was the Dave Matthews Band, the '90s-era jam-loving college-town rockers known affectionately as DMB (and less affectionately as "the Dave Matthews Bland").

The band is nothing to sneeze at, of course. It has won a Grammy. Six of its seven studio albums have hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts. Still, compared with the other big touring acts of 2010, DMB is a featherweight—"Stay" is no "Livin' on a Prayer." Bon Jovi (who, to be fair, will not be eligible for AARP membership until 2012), Roger Waters, and Paul McCartney have helped sell 130 million, 200 million, and north of 1.3 billion records, respectively. In the course of its two-decade-long career, DMB has moved a more modest 30 million.

But in an industry busy having its foundations rocked, in a matter of speaking, it hardly matters. Analysts and executives have long lamented that the music industry is dying. That is not quite true—it is the record business that is clearly done for, and in its place, touring stands as the top moneymaker for many industry participants. DMB lives to tour, making them not just popular, but very, very profitable.

When I say DMB lives to tour, I do not jest: Every summer for the past two decades, the band has hit the road. In 2010, that meant playing 62 shows in 50 cities to 1,270,477 fans—more than any other artist touring in North America. The group also took trips to Europe and South America, and there was a Dave Matthews and guitarist Tim Reynolds mini-tour. And the year was hardly unusual. Since 1992, Dave Matthews Band in its various iterations has played a whopping 1,692 shows.

So the precipitous decline in record sales in the past decade has hardly hurt DMB's profitability: The band makes the bulk of its money touring anyway. And it makes a lot of money doing it. According to Billboard Boxscore, between 2000 and 2009, DMB sold more tickets to its shows than any other band on the planet, moving a staggering 11,230,696 tickets. (No other band sold more than 10 million tickets in the same time period.) In the aughts, DMB grossed more than $500 million from touring alone.

On top of that, of course, there are profits from merchandise, records, and other revenue streams. As long ago as 1998, DMB reportedly pulled in $200,000 a day in merchandise sales on tour. Plus, DMB has a reported 80,000 fans paying $35 a year for fan-club membership. And it benefits from a large catalog of cheap-to-produce live-show discs and DVDs. "Without any marketing or promotion, Live at Red Rocks debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 chart and was instantly certified platinum," the band itself boasts of a 1998 album. "[It] provided fans with a high quality and reasonably priced alternative to the over-priced, ill produced, and illegal live DMB CDs."

Part of DMB's success undoubtedly comes from managing its tour so well—because gross ticket sales do not always translate into profitability. Lady Gaga, for instance, was also in the Top 10 for ­2010, grossing $51 million in North America, charging legions of fans about $100 a pop. But the shows proved enormously expensive to put on, what with the army of scantily clad backup dancers and dozens of fancy costumes—including a bra that shoots sparks, a feathered bird get-up, and an enormous wearable gyroscope nicknamed "the Orbit." Add in the fountain of fake blood and the price of flying such nonsense around the world, and extravagance cut into the bottom line. The tour actually lost money at first.

In contrast, DMB's tour seems downright humble. There is food. There is merchandise. There are video portions. But mostly, there are just the jams and the fans—and that's how DMB obsessives like it. Indeed, the band cultivates enthusiasts particularly well, a main secret of its success. It keeps ticket prices low in comparison with other big shows, an average of $58.79 compared with, say, $91.56 for arena-rockers Aerosmith. It offers a high proportion of plum tickets to fan-club members and offers them tons of freebies and special deals online. It also plays a stable roster of songs, but jams or improvises at each gig—meaning DMB fans tend to hit up the tour every year, often more than once. Thus, while even the biggest-selling artists front the occasional flopped tour, DMB never does.


read the full post HERE.

Infamous Early 1990s Music Industry Rant by Steve Albini

Hosted by Negativland here. Here's a sample:

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed. Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there's only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says "Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim again, please. Backstroke". And he does of course.

Every major label involved in the hunt for new bands now has on staff a high-profile point man, an "A & R" rep who can present a comfortable face to any prospective band. The initials stand for "Artist and Repertoire." because historically, the A & R staff would select artists to record music that they had also selected, out of an available pool of each. This is still the case, though not openly. These guys are universally young [about the same age as the bands being wooed], and nowadays they always have some obvious underground rock credibility flag they can wave.

Lyle Preslar, former guitarist for Minor Threat, is one of them. Terry Tolkin, former NY independent booking agent and assistant manager at Touch and Go is one of them. Al Smith, former soundman at CBGB is one of them. Mike Gitter, former editor of XXX fanzine and contributor to Rip, Kerrang and other lowbrow rags is one of them. Many of the annoying turds who used to staff college radio stations are in their ranks as well. There are several reasons A & R scouts are always young. The explanation usually copped-to is that the scout will be "hip to the current musical "scene." A more important reason is that the bands will intuitively trust someone they think is a peer, and who speaks fondly of the same formative rock and roll experiences. The A & R person is the first person to make contact with the band, and as such is the first person to promise them the moon. Who better to promise them the moon than an idealistic young turk who expects to be calling the shots in a few years, and who has had no previous experience with a big record company. Hell, he's as naive as the band he's duping. When he tells them no one will interfere in their creative process, he probably even believes it. When he sits down with the band for the first time, over a plate of angel hair pasta, he can tell them with all sincerity that when they sign with company X, they're really signing with him and he's on their side. Remember that great gig I saw you at in '85? Didn't we have a blast. By now all rock bands are wise enough to be suspicious of music industry scum. There is a pervasive caricature in popular culture of a portly, middle aged ex-hipster talking a mile-a-minute, using outdated jargon and calling everybody "baby." After meeting "their" A & R guy, the band will say to themselves and everyone else, "He's not like a record company guy at all! He's like one of us." And they will be right. That's one of the reasons he was hired.

These A & R guys are not allowed to write contracts. What they do is present the band with a letter of intent, or "deal memo," which loosely states some terms, and affirms that the band will sign with the label once a contract has been agreed on. The spookiest thing about this harmless sounding little memo, is that it is, for all legal purposes, a binding document. That is, once the band signs it, they are under obligation to conclude a deal with the label. If the label presents them with a contract that the band don't want to sign, all the label has to do is wait. There are a hundred other bands willing to sign the exact same contract, so the label is in a position of strength. These letters never have any terms of expiration, so the band remain bound by the deal memo until a contract is signed, no matter how long that takes. The band cannot sign to another laborer or even put out its own material unless they are released from their agreement, which never happens. Make no mistake about it: once a band has signed a letter of intent, they will either eventually sign a contract that suits the label or they will be destroyed.

......
Read the full thing, including the dollar breakdown of a sample contract at Negativland.

The Music-Copyright Enforcers (NYT Mag)

NYT Magazine

August 6, 2010
The Music-Copyright Enforcers
By JOHN BOWE

Beginning and excerpts:

Few things can make Devon Baker cry.

There was the time her pet hamster, Herschel, died. There was the time she was run over by a car. Neither episode provoked tears. Not even close. And yet, on a recent Thursday, as Baker drove down Highway 60, about 55 miles northwest of Phoenix, she had to wonder, Is today one of those days when I’m gonna cry?

Baker, who has preternaturally white teeth, green eyes, soft brown hair and a friendly way that she’s the first to describe as “country,” was on her once-a-month, weeklong road trip. She’d flown to Phoenix to meet with bar and restaurant owners to discuss a rather straightforward business proposal. Off she went on her rounds each day, navigating with a special Microsoft Streets and Trips plan she prepared in advance, with 60 to 80 venues marked with dots, triangles or blue squares, according to size, dollar value and priority, wearing her company badge with photo ID, hoping for a little friendly discussion. Except it didn’t always work out so friendly.

Once, a venue owner exploded, kicked her off his property and told her, as she recalled, “to get the bleep outta here.” Another hissed at her that she was “nothing more than a vulture that flew over and came down and ate up all of the little people.” It wasn’t fun. It was just the sort of thing, in fact, that could bring Devon Baker to tears.

Baker, 30, is a licensing executive with Broadcast Music Incorporated, otherwise known as BMI. The firm is a P.R.O., or performing rights organization; P.R.O.’s license the music of the songwriters and music publishers they represent, collecting royalties whenever that music is played in a public setting. Which means that if you buy a CD by, say, Ryan Adams, or download one of his songs from iTunes, and play it at your family reunion, even if 500 people come, you owe nothing. But if you play it at a restaurant you own, then you must pay for the right to harness Adams’s creativity to earn money for yourself. Which leaves you with three choices: you can track down Ryan Adams, make a deal with him and pay him directly; you can pay a licensing fee to the P.R.O. that represents him — in this case, BMI; or you can ignore the issue altogether and hope not to get caught.

P.R.O.’s like BMI spend much of their energy negotiating licenses with the biggest users of music — radio stations, TV and cable networks, film studios, streaming Internet music sites and so on. But a significant portion of BMI’s business is to “educate” and charge — by phone and in person — the hundreds of thousands of businesses across America that don’t know or don’t care to know that they have to pay for the music they use. Besides the more obvious locales like bars and nightclubs, the list of such venues includes: funeral parlors, grocery stores, sports arenas, fitness centers, retirement homes — tens of thousands of businesses, playing a collective many billions of songs per year.

Most Americans have no problem with BMI charging for its music — except when they do. As Richard Conlon, a vice president at BMI in charge of new media, put it: “A few years back, we had Penn, Schoen and Berland, Hillary’s pollster guys, do a study. The idea was, go and find out what Americans really think about copyright. Do songwriters deserve to be paid? Absolutely! The numbers were enormously favorable — like, 85 percent. The poll asked, ‘If there was a party that wasn’t compensating songwriters, do you think that would be wrong?’ And the answer was, ‘Yes!’ So then, everything’s fine, right? Wrong. Because when it came time to ask people to part with their shekels, it was like: ‘Eww. You want me to pay?’ ”

........

Performing rights organizations in the United States came into being in 1914, when a group of musicians, including Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin and John Philip Sousa, founded the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, otherwise known as ASCAP, the nation’s first P.R.O., in 1914. It was formed in response to a 1909 amendment to United States copyright law that explicitly provided for performance rights as opposed to mechanical rights (paid to a performer who plays a song, regardless of who wrote it) or sync rights (music synchronized to pictures). The law — and ASCAP — were given new force when Herbert, then a celebrity composer for Broadway, sued a New York restaurant called Shanley’s after hearing one of his compositions performed there. The case took a couple of years to wind through the courts, but in the end, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes decided for Herbert. “If music did not pay, it would be given up,” Holmes wrote. “Whether it pays or not, the purpose of employing it is profit and that is enough.”

In 1939, radio broadcasters, irked at paying royalties set by ASCAP, which was then a monopoly, founded their own P.R.O., BMI. This they did by rounding up the many songwriters excluded from ASCAP’s umbrella: “race musicians,” toiling away in the déclassé genres of jazz, country, blues and, later, rock ’n’ roll. Today, BMI represents some 400,000 songwriters (ASCAP has 390,000, many of whom are from those formerly déclassé genres), including Willie Nelson, Dave Brubeck, Keith Urban, Lady Gaga, the Beach Boys, Taylor Swift, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Café Tacuba, Kanye West, Shakira, Linkin Park, Mariah Carey, Sheryl Crow and Kid Rock. The songs and compositions written by BMI signatories number some seven million tunes — about half the music in America — and bring in close to a billion dollars per year, which is distributed to its artists in quarterly royalty checks. For antitrust reasons BMI operates (as does ASCAP) by consent decree from the Department of Justice. It is privately owned but chartered to operate as a not-for-profit, to guarantee the maximum possible return to its songwriters and publishers (in 2010, it retained 11.6 percent of royalties collected for administrative costs).

In the past, BMI had 14 regional offices around the country, with field agents reading local newspapers and scouring the land on foot and by car, ever on the lookout for new bars and restaurants or old ones that aren’t paying for their music. Now those offices are closed, and employees like Devon Baker do much of their work by phone from headquarters in Nashville. But with the Internet, it has never been easier to keep tabs on the nation’s businesses­. Venues advertise online which nights they offer live music or karaoke; state governments post liquor-license and corporate registries that give the names and addresses of business owners.

Once contacted by BMI, owners are given a worksheet. Does their venue use a radio, CD players, karaoke machine? Do they feature live music? If so, how often? How many people can the venue legally hold? For smaller businesses with low capacity that don’t make much use of music, a license may be as little as $300 a year. For really big operators, the cost might be as much as $9,000 per location per year, the maximum BMI is permitted to charge a single customer. (The fees are distributed to artists based on what BMI calls “an appropriate surrogate” — local radio or TV — that reflects a sampling of bars and restaurants in the area.) All in all, the division Devon Baker works for, General Licensing, accounts for 11 percent of BMI’s revenue.

.............

Being a BMI licensing exec is one of the hardest jobs a person can have, Mike O’Neill, senior vice president of repertoire and licensing, told me. “It’s different from other industries and sales situations,” O’Neill said. “Clients aren’t deciding whether to pay you so you can send them your product. They’ve already got it.”

We have a hard time paying for music, says O’Neill, because most of us grew up listening to it on the radio. It was free then. Shouldn’t it be free now? Of course, music on the radio was, in fact, not free. Radio stations paid licensing fees to BMI and ASCAP and paid for those fees by airing commercials, which took up some 20 percent of airtime. The Internet allows users to download tunes, often without paying for them, avoid annoying commercials and play a song whenever they wish. The ease with which music can be had has contributed enormously to the notion that it’s there for the taking. In 2008, 40 billion songs were downloaded illegally. It is estimated that 95 percent of music tracks are downloaded without payment to the artist or the music company that produced them. Peer-to-peer (P2P) file swapping of movies and music currently accounts for up to 80 percent of Internet traffic. Music sales among American record labels in 2010 are about 42 percent of what they were a decade ago. As an industry report from January of this year states, “A generation of young music fans is growing up with the expectation that music should be instantly available, with near-limitless choice and access and, of course, free.”

Many musicians have coped with downloading by focusing on touring. They have learned to consider their recorded output, formerly their bread and butter, as a form of promotion for live shows. But the rise of musical genres, like northern Brazil’s “tecno brega” (“cheesy techno”), which remixes and reworks popular songs, offers another, more direct challenge to who should be paid when music is recorded or performed. The producers give away their mixes, so there’s no copyright infringement, then make their money by staging dance parties, to which admission is charged. In the States, producers like Danger Mouse and Girl Talk have created mash-ups of marquee copyrighted material, like Beatles songs, then released them to the general public free, daring authorities to charge them.

Most well-known songwriters are reluctant to advocate publicly for copyright law, out of fear of alienating fans. Dolly Parton is not one of them. “Ain’t nobody got so much money they don’t want all the money that’s coming to them,” she said when I spoke to her recently. Rank-and-file songwriters, whose livelihood can depend desperately on their BMI royalties, are the most likely to express sentiments similar to Parton’s. One day, I visited a Los Angeles DJ and electronica composer named Alex Amato. Amato, as it happens, lives in a converted barn near Vine and Santa Monica that, he said, belonged to the filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Under the name Genuine Childs, Amato composes music with his twin brother, Anthony, which they’ve sold to reality shows like MTV’s “Real World” and “Road Rules.” They’ve also composed DVD menu page music for several big studio releases like “Scarface” and “The Bourne Identity.” It’s a rarefied niche, but Amato seems happy: his music reaches millions of listeners.

Amato also waits on tables and manages a restaurant near his house. His quarterly BMI checks, he insists, are the key to survival. “It’s like my magical Willy Wonka ticket,” he says. Creating music, Amato points out, costs money. It takes money to rent a space, buy equipment, run the equipment. How does music get made if everything suddenly becomes free?

“There are more people listening to music now than ever before,” he told me. “But because of this new kind of accessibility, people feel like they don’t have to pay. Why is that? Why does constructor Joe get to build a house, and he gets paid the same as before, but suddenly, there’s this judgment about this one way of earning a living?”

It is worth noting that during the years the recording industry lost nearly 60 percent of its income, BMI and its competitor ASCAP had steady increases in profits. BMI has done so by going after how people use music commercially, regardless of medium. As the president and chief executive of BMI, Del Bryant, likes to say, “You have to be in the future a little bit.”

In BMI’s case, this has meant leapfrogging from AM radio to FM, from movies to cable to digital radio to streaming to (once-illegal) downloading companies like Napster. (BMI began working on a deal with Napster about streaming music even before it sorted out its legitimacy.) They also signed with Rhapsody, the online streaming site, when the company was in its infancy. The trick, says Bryant, is to understand the content world as an ecosystem. When a new player comes along, don’t kill it, make a deal with it. With each new medium, he says: “We made agreements that weren’t that heavily monetized, and not that heavily binding because we didn’t know if it’d be around for long or how it would evolve. They were place keepers, ways to get us working together. And they slowly solidified. It’s all a question of pricing. The system has to serve everyone’s purposes.”

Richard Conlon echoed what Del Bryant said. “We’re not about shutting things down.” he told me. “We’re about nurturing markets. We don’t want people NOT to use it. We know the market is fractionalizing. You wanna take our music and stream it and have electronic whatevers that play when you stick a chip into something or somebody? Go ahead! Do it! Just pay us!”

..........

BMI is rosy about the future. According to Conlon, who spends a lot of time watching how 8-to-15-year-olds use technology, downloading is out, streaming is in. And guess what? Streaming pays — just like radio. Legally the climate is good too. In May, a federal court found LimeWire, one of the few remaining big free peer-to-peer file-sharing services, guilty of inducing copyright infringement. The company could be fined as much as a billion dollars.

While the rest of the content world worries that technology will be the end of content, P.R.O.’s are banking that technology will save it. BMI has developed a system called Blue Arrow that deploys the same technology as iPhone’s Shazam to identify music. (ASCAP uses a similar system called Mediaguide.) These systems can listen to Internet sites, as well as radio and TV stations around the world and identify, in two seconds, virtually any piece of music being played — not just American, but Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Latin, Japanese and so on. The Blue Arrow database has a capacity of 500 terabytes (one thousand gigabytes each) of music, and can recognize eight million songs. About 3,000 new songs are added each day.

David DeBusk, who was vice president of business development when I met him this spring but has since left BMI, offered to show me how Blue Arrow works. An employee punched a few keys to find out which radio stations in Germany were playing “schlager music,” a bizarrely kitschy form of country pop. One tap of the keyboard, and we were listening live: Oom pah pah, oom pah pah. We went on to display all stations, worldwide, playing Swedish death metal. Did I want to see which ones were playing compositions by the composer Milton Babbitt? How about radio stations in Laos?

In the old days, P.R.O.’s relied mainly on playlists from radio stations and queue sheets from TV networks to figure out which songs were broadcast each month. Queue sheets were quite precise, listing every song a station broadcast, but playlists were, at best, a sample, an attempt to track the bulk of what got played. With Blue Arrow, however, it is possible to count every song played by a representative sampling of 400 radio stations across the country. Under the old system, hit-makers tended to dominate the machinery of royalty collection and distribution. Now, the “long tail” can be more effectively monetized: writers with minor hits, older hits, songs played here and there.

When DeBusk and his team began to hear the world through Blue Arrow’s ears, one thing they noticed was the number of “nonsong performances.” Everyone knows that rap music relies on sampled music, some of which should be paid for and isn’t. What surprised DeBusk was how common it was for copyrighted bits of music to be used free in jingles, as station-identification ditties and background music. DeBusk pulled up a screen detailing a list of nonsongs with generic names like “Graceful Power” and “Happy Days.” Such compositions, he said, are known as “production music,” written for ads and station identifications or for TV documentaries, and then sold to music libraries. If producers are looking for something that, say, sounds like boogie woogie or bebop, they go to a music library, listen to a few samples and purchase one.

One click with Blue Arrow and we knew that “Happy Days” was broadcast at five different times that morning on networks in the Southeast. Another click determined that it was used in a commercial for Country Crock margarine. Yet another click located its source: a music library in Atlanta. A few more key punches, and you knew if the library got their fee.

It was an awesome (or chilling) glimpse into the future: a world where if it can be tracked — on TV, on YouTube, in China — it will be charged for. Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor known for his stance against what he views as an overexpansion of copyright law, is not against BMI’s being paid for its fair share but worries about the slippery slope created by new technologies. “If technology creates efficient ways to charge commercial users of copyright, then that’s good,” he told me recently, “but what I fear is that we evolve into a permission culture, where every single use of music creates an obligation to pay. I wish the line could be as clear as commercial exploitation — you’re running a dance club, using it in a movie. The author ought to have the right to be paid for that. But I don’t think that that right should translate into the right to control whether my kid uses the music for a collage he makes for a class about his trip to Costa Rica!” Friends I talked to had a similar reaction. To a one, they said: “Jesus. Sounds like Big Brother.” When I mentioned this to DeBusk, he smiled ominously. “Yes. Well. We’re here to help.”

................





It's a long story; read it HERE.

Wendy's pulls free CD over Donna Summer lyrics

Racy lyrics lead Wendy's to pull CD from kid meals

June 12, 2010
updated 2 hours 33 minutes ago

ATLANTA — The fast food-chain Wendy's has pulled a disco CD included in kids' meals because of racy lyrics in one of the songs.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that one of the songs on the Disco Fever CD was Donna Summer's "Last Dance." The song has two sets of lyrics. One version includes the words "so bad." But some heard the alternative lyrics "so horny" on the CD, which had been marked as safe for 3 years old and up.

The Atlanta-based chain announced on its website Saturday that it would continue to put three other CDs in the kids' meals. Those CDs include the songs "ABC" by Jackson 5 and "Celebration" by Kool & the Gang. The website said Wendy's is "no longer offering" the Disco Fever CD but doesn't mention the reason.

A reader sent this related video suggestion from Newsy.com [thanks!]:

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Dogfish Head Brewery has a Bitches Brew Beer in honor of Miles Davis' 1970 Bitches Brew album

In honor of the 40th anniversary of Miles Davis' historic Bitches Brew album, the Dogfish Head Brewery has unveiled a Bitches Brew...well, brew. Check it out.

Nike's epic Write the Future commercial

I can't believe I'm posting a commercial, but this one, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, is so good I cannot resist:

Roger Ebert on Why He Hates 3-D for Films

Newsweek


SPONSORED BY:
Why I Hate 3-D (And You Should Too)

I'm not opposed to 3-D as an option. I'm opposed to it as a way of life.

By Roger Ebert | NEWSWEEK
Published Apr 29, 2010
From the magazine issue dated May 10, 2010

3-D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension. Hollywood's current crazy stampede toward it is suicidal. It adds nothing essential to the moviegoing experience. For some, it is an annoying distraction. For others, it creates nausea and headaches. It is driven largely to sell expensive projection equipment and add a $5 to $7.50 surcharge on already expensive movie tickets. Its image is noticeably darker than standard 2-D. It is unsuitable for grown-up films of any seriousness. It limits the freedom of directors to make films as they choose. For moviegoers in the PG-13 and R ranges, it only rarely provides an experience worth paying a premium for.

That's my position. I know it's heresy to the biz side of show business. After all, 3-D has not only given Hollywood its biggest payday ($2.7 billion and counting for Avatar), but a slew of other hits. The year's top three films—Alice in Wonderland, How to Train Your Dragon, and Clash of the Titans—were all projected in 3-D, and they're only the beginning. The very notion of Jackass in 3-D may induce a wave of hysterical blindness, to avoid seeing Steve-O's you-know-what in that way. But many directors, editors, and cinematographers agree with me about the shortcomings of 3-D. So do many movie lovers—even executives who feel stampeded by another Hollywood infatuation with a technology that was already pointless when their grandfathers played with stereoscopes. The heretics' case, point by point:

Read the entire article HERE.

DJ Spooky on copyright law: Open Source, Open Culture

Big Think
....

Question: Should digital content be free?

DJ Spooky: I’m a big pro-open source, pro-creative commons kind of artist. I think that it’s important to realize that copyright law as it is written relates mainly to the 18th century’s relationship to physical goods. And as things move more and more to a digital media, hyper-connected world we need to transform the models of how we think of ownership. Copyright law is something I respect, but the way the law is written versus the way we live in this rip, mix, burn kind of scenario, you know... It’s all about I think thinking of digital music as the kind of new folk culture where everyone should share, and by sharing they create a more rich and robust, you know, narrative.
......

Check out the interview on video HERE.

Against Yoga's Expense and Star System

New York Times has a story on Yoga's New Wave:

April 23, 2010
A Yoga Manifesto
By MARY BILLARD

ZEN is expensive. The flattering Groove pants, Lululemon’s answer to Spanx, may set Luluheads, the devoted followers of the yoga-apparel brand, back $108. Manduka yoga mats, favored for their slip resistance and thickness, can reach $100 for a limited-edition version. Drop-in classes at yoga studios in New York are edging beyond $20 a session, which quickly adds up, and the high-end Pure Yoga, a chain with two outposts in Manhattan, requires a $40 initiation fee, and costs $125 to $185 a month.

You can even combine yoga with a vacation in the Caribbean, but it will cost you: in August, the luxurious Parrot Cay resort in Turks and Caicos has a six-night retreat with classes taught by the “yoga rock stars” (in the words of the press release) Rodney Yee and Colleen Saidman. The cost? A cool $6,077. (In August!)

And is it surprising that yoga, like so much else in this age of celebrity, now has something of a star system, with yoga teachers now almost as recognizable as Oscar winners? The flowing locks of Rodney Yee. The do-rag bandanna worn by Baron Baptiste. The hyper perpetual calm exhibited by David Life and Sharon Gannon, who taught Sting, Madonna and Russell Simmons. The contortions (and Rolls-Royces) of Bikram Choudhury.

Yoga is definitely big business these days. A 2008 poll, commissioned by Yoga Journal, concluded that the number of people doing yoga had declined from 16.5 million in 2004 to 15.8 million almost four years later. But the poll also estimated that the actual spending on yoga classes and products had almost doubled in that same period, from $2.95 billion to $5.7 billion.

“The irony is that yoga, and spiritual ideals for which it stands, have become the ultimate commodity,” Mark Singleton, the author of “Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice,” wrote in an e-mail message this week. “Spirituality is a style, and the ‘rock star’ yoga teachers are the style gurus.”

Well, maybe it is the recession, but some yogis are now saying “Peace out” to all that. There’s a brewing resistance to the expense, the cult of personality, the membership fees. At the forefront of the movement is Yoga to the People, which opened its first studio in 2006 in the East Village on St. Marks Place, with a contribution-only, pay-what-you-can fee structure. The manifesto is on the opening page of its Web site, yogatothepeople.com: “There will be no correct clothes, There will be no proper payment, There will be no right answers ... No ego no script no pedestals.”

One more thing: There are no “glorified” teachers or star yogis. You can’t even find out who is teaching which class when, or reserve a spot with a specific instructor. And that’s exactly the way that Greg Gumucio wants it.
Read the full story HERE.

TicketMaster's Merge with Live Nation

The New York Times has a good story on the merger HERE.